The Grave Watches Over Her Lilies (A Man Who Loved)
by Tom a Mild Overlord
Summary: Draco and Harry offer one last toast to the professor's memory.


The professor was buried in the backyard of his father's abandoned house. He had apparently never returned to claim the cottage, so it belonged to the spiders now: they'd filled the void of man's long absence with elaborate webs spreading outward from the dark corners underneath the roof. Patterned and elegant, Draco thought, like snowflakes. There were several broken windows – probably the work of neighborhood children with too much nerve and not enough respect. But if it was, it happened long ago. Spider webs spanned each one of the broken windows, as if trying to conceal whatever secrets hid behind its empty panes.

The grave itself rested on a small slope, shadowed twice over in the twilight, first by the unmarked headstone and second by the ghost of the house itself. The headstone was only inches away from the rusted fence that ringed the property. It was too close, uncomfortably close, and not at all a logical place for a grave. It smacked of deliberate disrespect. Draco now felt certain he knew who had dug that grave, who made those choices, and who spat at the memory of the man who saved – how many? Maybe them all. And Draco couldn't blame Potter for the slights. There was a reason that the headstone bore no inscription; what was there kind to say about a professor who berated children, who hated his teaching and his students, and harbored a grown man's loathing for a boy who'd done nothing wrong but be born to a father whom the professor did not like?

Draco did not like Snape either. Respected him, for his conviction, for his exceptional, enviable, damn near perfect self-control, but liking? Not a chance. Draco was here because he owed Snape. There were debts: his father's freedom, his very life, the possibility of passing on the Malfoy name and recouping the sterling – reputation and actual silver – he and his idiot father had squandered during the war. But he couldn't pay back debts to a dead man. So Draco paid respects.

Looking out past the fence but before horizon was a tall, thin, male silhouette. It was not robed. A muggle? But whoever owned the shadow wasn't ambling, but walking with long, purposeful strides. He meant to come this way. And he was moving fast; he'd soon clambered over the wall, not with boyish enthusiasm, but with a burglar's haste and fierce intent. The man wiped his hands on his shirt, and then ran them absently through his hair, rendering it even more of a mess. So the gravedigger had returned to look at his handiwork. What did he owe to the professor who hated him for seven years?

In the twilight, Draco could make out Potter. He was not impressed. The man wore a plain white T-shirt, now dirtied from the fence he had climbed, and faded jeans. His wand was tucked into his back pocket, carelessly. A fall from the fence would have snapped it. In his right he held a bouquet of flowers, with pristine white bulbs at the top but dirt clods still clumping to the roots at the bottom. Draco laughed, quietly. Draco had worn his father's best finery.

Potter must have heard him, and spoke, evenly and in warm tones.

"Hello, Draco."

"Potter." Draco had no interest in pleasantries. He had hoped to be long gone when Potter arrived.

"I'm glad to see you here. He's earned it."

"Agreed, then. For once. You dug the grave?"

"Yes," said Potter.

"By magic?"

"With a spade."

How noble of the boy-hero. And pointless. A grave is just a hole in the ground, and that's true whether you carve it out by magic or drudge in it with a shovel. Manual labor is not a prayer, or a spell, but a waste of effort. To the point, then.

"Why are you here?"

"To pay respects."

Draco chewed on his bottom lip. He wondered if he still hated Potter.

"You can see my mother's house from beyond the fence. The two-story Tudor – the one with the flickering lights in the top window. Do you see it?"

Draco nodded. Where was Potter going with this?

"This was where Severus grew up. He and my mother used to play in this yard, and when she left I think he would have watched her leave, or maybe, you know, when he was older, looked over at the house and over at that top bedroom. It might have been hers, I don't know. I wanted the grave to overlook the house. I think Severus would have liked that."

"Potter - you're not making sense."

"He loved my mother, Draco. He loved her always – they were friends growing up and he loved her until she died. Until he died. That's why he turned for us; he was protecting me for her."

"He hated you, Potter."

"He hated my father. He didn't….he saw my father when he looked at my face. But it's over. I don't have to hate him anymore."

Potter sighed and ran his hand, yet again, through his messy hair. He's tired, like I am, Draco thought.

Potter's theory had an oddly compelling logic – though Draco still doubted Snape's ability to love anything or anyone. The closest thing to love Draco had seen from Snape was his morbid fascination with and obsession over his favored subjects. And if Snape really had saved Potter for his mother, why had he made the unbreakable vow with Draco's own mother, and shielded him from Voldemort's wrath? Surely he hadn't harbored unrequited love for two of his students' mothers. Ridiculous. Potter was being ridiculous.

But Snape saved his life – and so did Potter, twice over. Potter could be wrong, irrational, and prattle on about love like Dumbledore, and Draco would have to put up with it, because he owed Potter for everything. There was nothing to do. Potter owned him.

"I brought lilies for the grave. From my mother's garden."

"It's not hers, anymore," replied Draco. "There are muggles living there now."

"I think they'd understand if they knew."

Potter was arrogant and presumptuous, and when he acted impetuously he expected people to understand. Wasn't that why Snape hated him so?

"Did you –"

"Firewhiskey," said Draco, having anticipated the question. "I thought I'd drink to him." And to forget, of course.

"I'd like to toast him. May I join you?"

"Be my guest."

Draco pulled from the inside of his robes a bottle of amber liquid, and with a subtle flourish of his wand, produced two crystal shot-glasses, one of which he levitated over to Potter.

"Over fifty years old, if the family elf is to be believed."

"I believe it," said Potter, reaching out for the glass.

Of course you do, thought Draco. He took a few steps forward and poured for Potter, and then himself. Draco paused a moment for Potter to make his toast.

Potter did not say anything. He opened his mouth, closed it again, and then ran his hands through his hair. Pitiful; Draco looked away, and let his gaze rest on the headstone, at the space where an inscription should have been written.

At last Potter found his meagre wits. He lifted his glass to the Death Eater unmasked. "Severus Snape, a man who loved."

Draco raised his glass to Potter. "To Professor Severus Snape, a man of impeccable precision, control, and will."

They drank. And they stood in silence, until Potter took a few small steps, laid his bouquet of lilies in the shadow of the headstone, and turned to the fence. He had a foot in it before Draco, compelled perhaps by whatever idiocy it was that let he and father kick down the foundations of House Malfoy, to call to him.

"Potter?"

Potter looked back from the fence, one foot still in its rings.

"Thank you."

"For –" Don't make me spell it out, thought Draco. You damn well know.

"Just thank you."

Potter waved off Draco's words with his hands.

"It's nothing, Draco. We're okay. Let's just be – let's just move on."

Potter forgave everything and understood nothing; he was the better man. Draco nodded.

And with that Potter scampered over the fence, left his form for the tall, thin silhouette made clear by the last light of the sun, and walked out into the horizon until that too was gone.

Draco was tired. He was tired of the war, tired of his mistakes, tired of owing others to the point that he was no longer his own man. He sloshed whiskey into his glass, drank deeply, and bent down to place the smoking glass next to Potter's lilies.

And he disapparated on the spot, leaving only an empty shot-glass, a bouquet of white flowers, and a blank gray slab of rock under the shadow of house where the unshakeable war hero and perfectly controlled spy was once a lovesick little boy, longing over the fence for the girl he always wanted but could never have.


End file.
